Fedora 16 upgrade

[atreyu]

As Fedora 16 is officially out, I bit the bullet and attempted to do a "preupgrade" of Fedora, from version 15 to 16. I did not even know of the existence of this capability until I ran across this article this morning.

Well, I first backed up everything of course, then I proceeded with the instructions in the above link. I did not have to worry about the /boot space mentioned there b/c my /boot is not a separate partition.

It was with more than a little trepidation that I su'd to root and began the process...but less than 1 hour later, I am happy to report that the upgrade proceeded seamlessly and I was able to log in to my new desktop after one reboot (and restoring my backed up files/dirs).

Well, wait a minute - I have one clarification: the kernel people (I'm guessing) decided to change the kernel device name for my Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5751 GBE network adapter from em1 to p2p1. It took me a couple minutes to work out the problem, b/c systemd chews up and spits out /etc/init.d/network errors, but I got it sorted. Basically, I just had to do:

cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-em1|sed -e 's|^DEVICE=.*$|DEVICE=p2p1|' > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-p2p1
rm -f /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-em1
service network restart

I can't really fault Fedora for that, but it would have been nice if they had something in the upgrade process that caught that.

Anyway, the non-upgrade-ability of Fedora is finally history for me - w00t! Kudos to the hard-working geeks @ the Fedora Project!

EDIT: one more thing - it did not automatically install grub2 to the MBR, so I was using the old grub menu when I rebooted (thus, did not boot into new F16 kernel). Easy fix (posted here):

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
grub2-install /dev/sda

EDIT 2: another two things: yum update failed b/c it wanted java-x.x.x-openjdk but could not figure out how to install it. fixed that with:

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk

also, nautilus was broken (i.e., no desktop icons and trying to access Home Folder via Places did not work). The package nautilus-terminal apparently needs to be updated, but it is not in the F16 updates repo yet. Removing this package fixed that:

yum erase nautilus

I hope there are not too many more edits in my future...

EDIT 3: The cups printing service was off-line, dag nabit. Had to do:

yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing cups-1.5.0-19.fc16

Then I could successfully start it with:

systemctl start cups.service

But I wanted to make sure it came up after reboots so I did:

systemctl enable cups.service

Then rebooted...and yes, printing works again.

[Roxoff]

I was a bit more ballsy - I saw the release news article flow past on /. and immediately grabbed my netbook. I opened the lid and connected to my employers non-core wireless network and ran the preupgrade tool. I've used it before so it held no surprises. I ran no backups, took no precautions and I didn't even wait a couple of months for the new Fedora to stabilise, I just dived right in.

And nothing happened - no drama, no failed hardware, no lost files. It just updated, then I rebooted. The only changes (apart from kernel 3.x which looks unusual, but isn't) is that the wireless now seems to connect slightly quicker and the snooze/wakeup is a bit faster.

Also I ought to point out to people that my netbook has a 'disposable' environment. I keep nothing on it that I don't have a copy of elsewhere, or that I couldn't afford to lose (it is, after all, ultra portable so could go missing completely). I don't recommend anyone do what I did.